Why I Changed My Mind About Shorts
If you hate uploading YouTube shorts and these vertical videos and reels, you will want to read this, because I have hated uploading all these little videos. I mostly make long form video and stream on Twitch, so these little short videos have been really annoying to me. But I found a statistic recently that made it abundantly clear why, if you are a YouTuber or a Twitch streamer, you really need to do these short videos. The ideal formula is to get discovered on shorts, then to have long format videos on YouTube, and then live streams on Twitch. That is how you really cement a following, a community, and how you can make yourself a full time creator. If you don't do shorts, you just don't get these new viewers as easily, and you can put a short on all the different platforms.
What I am looking at is one of my recent shorts. At the end of the day, it barely showed it to any of my existing viewers, but it showed it to a huge number of brand new people. This happens on every short. It cranks it out to people who have never seen me before. I tried to rationalize not doing shorts, because if you do long form content, it is annoying, especially if you stream on Twitch, to then try and make something extra. I have got six different YouTube channels, and they are mostly longs, because long format videos are the main place I get lots of minutes watched. If you look at my crypto channel, I crank out videos there, and they get lots of minutes watched. It takes just as much time to make a long video here that gets an average of about five minutes, sometimes more, per view. I can do that video in the same amount of time it takes to make one of these shorts.
One Short, Five Platforms
Here is what I found. That short that got so many views from new viewers versus returning viewers, I then put on my Twitter. I upload it as a native video on Twitter, I upload it on TikTok, I upload the same thing as a reel on Instagram, and then I also upload it to my Facebook page. When I was doing shorts and reels every single day, I was averaging thousands of views, about 10,000 views per short across all of it. I stopped doing them for a while because it was taking extra time to create them. But one of these, on this recent video, went out to 8,000 people on Facebook and got thousands of views. Shorts are the only thing where you can record one video and put it on all five of those different big social media sites.
I don't want to put a full YouTube video on all five of those platforms natively. When I record a video on YouTube, I have to send everybody else over to YouTube, and people don't come over that often from TikTok or Instagram or Twitter to YouTube. They really don't come over from almost anywhere except YouTube to Twitch. But when I do these shorts, it is effective in building a new audience. When you look at new viewers versus returning viewers, and this is a couple of days delayed so you have to wait for the numbers a bit, I got more than 20 times as many views from new viewers as I did from returning viewers.
Compare that to a regular video I made about my favorite food. I could have made that into a short but I didn't, and it only got 95 views compared to that short getting over 600. YouTube barely put the food video out to anybody. So if you want to be a full time creator like me, you need discovery from new viewers, and you need to be able to reach people on all five of the main platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. You can do that with shorts on all five platforms. Then the ideal strategy from there is to make different channels on YouTube and send everybody over to Twitch. I am grateful that is working well for me, and I am sticking with it consistently. If you want to go deeper on the mechanics of all this with me, the best way to work with me on it now is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share exactly what I am doing as I do it.
Filming Shorts While Live on Twitch
I finally found the ideal formula, where you crank out a short every day, and what I have now that is so cool is that I am actually filming my shorts while I am live on Twitch. The quick version is that I set up a scene in OBS, and then it only takes a second to film the short. Then I actually edit it and upload it while I am on Twitch, so that I am not stuck spending a whole bunch of time doing a short outside my stream. I want to be live as much as possible on Twitch, because the main value of Twitch is the live interaction. That is the one thing none of the shorts and none of the YouTube videos have.
So I have got my workflow set up now where I do everything while I am live on Twitch. I record all my longs, all my shorts, and upload all of them while I am live, and it is beautiful. I have never seen anybody with as smooth of a workflow as this, where in two or three hours a day of real time I am able to crank out a short and videos for six channels, plus do some lives: a gaming channel, two crypto channels, a recovery channel, my main channel, and my business channel.
Subs don't matter at all for shorts, so I am now putting all of my shorts out on my main channel. My main channel has thousands of videos on it, and it is all garbaged up because I ran it as a variety channel for a long time, which was a bad idea. So now I am just throwing my shorts up on my main channel, and all these other channels stay as long channels, specific to certain topics: crypto, gaming, recovery, business, and so on. For YouTube I have not found that great a synergy between shorts and long viewers so far, so if somebody comes to my main channel from a short, I want them to see all my other shorts there. I don't want to scatter my shorts all over. I want these five channels to be very focused, and then my shorts go up on my main YouTube channel.
Be Consistent and Grind
Everywhere else, I just have one account that I use. I put shorts on Facebook and Twitter. On Twitter I promote, and on Facebook I also promote my YouTube videos and my Twitch streams. I do the same on Instagram. But then on TikTok, all I do is upload shorts. If you don't get hardly any views right away, what I can say from my own experience is to be consistent. When I was being consistent before, every one of my shorts was getting 10,000 views when you combine the views from all the different platforms.
What happens when you do get a video that goes off in the algorithm, like I did, is powerful. I had three videos on TikTok that got over a million views, and when one of those went off, all my other videos I created in proximity to it went off too. So you really need to just endlessly grind out shorts. And if you want to grind out shorts, you need long form content too, because a short is not usually enough to get a deep relationship with somebody. The ideal way to make a lasting relationship as a creator is to get with somebody on a live stream. I don't stream on YouTube, because with all the other channels it is a pain, so I bring everybody from all platforms to YouTube, and then to Twitch if you want to watch live streams. If you want to see more of how I coach through all of this, I keep it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
I hope this information is helpful for you. Instead of packaging all of this up in a thousand dollar course, I just wanted to put it out there for free, because this is the exact formula that took me from dreading shorts to building a brand new audience across every platform I am on.